Building the Shogun Team

We have some of the best talent found anywhere in the world and that's because we decided to go remote from the beginning. Remote has allowed us to open our search to, almost, anywhere in the world with access to wifi.
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How do you find people?

Initially, we found people through Upwork. When you dial up all the filters on the site, you can find great professionals. After bringing some on board, they brought friends along.

Nowadays we find people through word of mouth and places such as:

• WeWorkRemotely
• Ask HN: Who is hiring?
• AngelList
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Work at a Startup

Hiring remotely has been very easy for us so far. The talent pool is much larger.

How do you interview people?

The process varies per position. We screen fairly aggressively — after initial calls, there are usually one to three more rounds of interviews depending on the position.

We try to do trials when possible. Trials are a paid, temporary contract position that help both parties figure out if there's a mutual fit.

You really have no idea what it's going to be like to work somewhere until you actually do, and you really have no idea what it's going to be like to work with someone until you actually do. Hiring is always risky for both sides, and this significantly reduces that risk.

When trials are not possible, we typically do multiple reference checks.

How do you do onboarding?

Onboarding is very important to us as a company. We recognize that helping people get started on the right foot through comprehensive onboarding is the first step to retaining talented team members. We're constantly working to improve our onboarding process, but these are a few of the steps we've taken so far:

We use Donut to automate the onboarding workflow and make sure we're providing a consistent experience to team members. We've built a number of things into Donut including:

• Reminders to hiring managers, ops and IT to set up new hire access to key tools like Gmail, Notion, Slack, etc.
• Reminders to hiring managers to introduce their new hires to the team on their first day.
• Introductions to an onboarding buddy within Shogun to help new hires get acquainted with team and company culture.
• Reminders to schedule time with members of the People Ops team to make sure team members know all of the resources available to them.
• Automated emails to explain how people are paid and how frequently.
• Automated Slack messages directing new hires to key company information: mission, values, company meeting minutes, etc.
• Reminders to hiring managers to set up 1:1s and check-ins with their new hires.

We also make sure to welcome each new hire with a Shogun swag box, which includes things like t-shirts, a hooded sweatshirt, a water bottle and a wireless charger.

In addition to these general onboarding tasks, each team has their own onboarding process to help new hires get acquainted with their day-to-day responsibilities, as well as any tools they'll need to use.

Is everyone in the same place?

No. We have 60 people on the team in 21 countries across six continents.

To clarify, a lot of those countries only have one team member so far. Pockets are starting to emerge as team members refer their friends, but we still hire all over.

Do you have any offices?

No. Everyone works from home or coworking spaces. Well, everyone apart from one person who built an office in his garden beside his swimming pool!

We don't plan to start any offices. Remote is a lot easier when everyone is on the same playing field.

When you mix and match remote and in-person, it's a lot easier for information loss to occur.

How do you cope with different time zones?

We have no set hours and we have very few meetings.

The meetings we do have are deliberate and focused. Everything else is asynchronous (mostly Slack and Clubhouse) and we write a lot of things down using Notion.

Good project management is essential. This is an area we're actively improving!

How do you make sure people are productive?

The first step to achieving this goal is to hire self-motivated people who don't need to be managed.

Working remotely involves a huge amount of trust. You have to assume the best but verify by measuring results.

We don't measure hours — it's all about productivity. Some of us measure productivity using Qbserve.

One of the questions we ask people in interview is, "How do you keep yourself organized?" This is a simple-sounding but very telling question. The most productive people tend to have systems that they evolve over time.

The Culture of Shogun

Fostering a culture people love is hard regardless of office structure and it becomes increasingly difficult to manage when your team is in over 21 countries around the world.

We've learned many lessons throughout the years and have found that the best way to build culture is to treat adults like adults and set and live by simple, but powerful values.

What's the culture like at Shogun?

We highly value transparency, honesty, integrity, direct communication and respect.

We recently defined three company values by asking our team what was most important to them. There was a huge overlap in the suggested values from 39 different people.

Our values are:

• Work in the Open: Default to transparency
• People are People: Assume positive intent and treat everyone with respect
• Win and Grow Together: Individual growth is company growth

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Communicating & Connecting

The biggest difference we've found between working remotely and having a more traditional workplace is how we communicate. It's an adjustment, especially if you're new to remote completely.

The ability to walk over to a colleague's desk for quick clarification, or being able to invite your team members out to lunch isn't possible with a fully distributed team. However, we've come up with some ways to improve our communication to make up for the lack of face-to-face interaction.

What are the tools you use to communicate?

Slack

Slack is an instant messaging platform. It's our primary communication channel and we have some general rules around its usage.

Naming Conventions

We have specific naming and usage conventions around our slack channels. This makes it easier to find and search conversations, and join only those conversations relevant to you.

• We create temporary project channels named #project-name where all discussion around a particular project takes place.
• We have team channels named #team-name. These are for specific disciplines to hang out in. For example, #team-support, #team-dev and #team-marketing.
• We have squad channels named #squad-name.  These are for cross-functional product squads to hang out in. See more about squads below.
• Shared channels are called #shared-name. We have a lot of these with our partners and some clients.
• We have trial channels for prospective team members on trial, called #trial-name. This is to minimize disruption in the other team and squad channels.
• We have feed channels for all manner of alerts, called #feed-name. See the bots and integrations below.
• Anything not in one of these categories is prefixed with #x-name. For example, x-random, x-general and x-music.

Bots

We use 60 different Slack integrations! Some of the top ones are described below:

Donut

• We use Donut for onboarding and random meeting scheduling across teams. For onboarding, you can configure Donut with a sequence of messages spaced out over time. The messages can be sent to managers, new team members, operations team, etc., and can include surveys.
• We have an x-donuts channel. All members of this channel get randomly paired up once every two weeks to chat with someone else. Donut takes care of scheduling the meetings between the participants.

Geekbot

• Geekbot is pretty foundational to the way we run our company. It's a standup bot that asks people for answers to questions via Direct Message on a schedule. The schedule and the questions are configurable.
• Each team uses Geekbot differently. Almost all teams use it for weekly updates on a Friday. Our leadership team uses Geekbot to answer key questions once a week:

                - What went well?

                - What didn't go well?

                - What did you learn?

                - What puzzles you?

• Geekbot posts the completed surveys inside of feed channels. The answers to these questions often serve as the basis for Zoom calls and prompt discussion threads in the feed channel.

Ally

• Ally is a great piece of software for OKRs. It integrates with Slack and makes it extremely seamless and easy for people to post updates without leaving Slack.
• It also posts the updates in a shared channel between manager and direct report so you can immediately discuss the goals as updates come through.

Problems With Slack

It's way too easy to lose a conversation, especially when you are in a lot of channels. Here are two specific items I wish the company would implement:

• Keyboard shortcuts for asking Slack to remind you about messages
• Keyboard shortcuts for starting new threads and navigating threads in general

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Notion

Notion is a wiki tool that allows us to take meeting notes, create project outlines, set company guidelines and host information on our company and internal processes.

Structure

• We document a ton of stuff in here!
• Notion is where all permanent information is stored. It's not the best tool for things that update a lot.
• The biggest problem is it's open season and it can get really messy very quickly.

Notion is used as our source of truth for many aspects of our company including where we document our processes, the tools we use, team member and company information, team-specific documentation, meeting notes and much more.

It’s the permanent location for all of our important guides, policies and other information. Here are a few of the more major items we use Notion for:

• Mission and Values: Shogun’s mission, “Help people create the best ecommerce experiences in the world.”, and our company values: Work in the Open, People are People and Win and Grow Together are included in our Notion so that we can easily share them with each new team member.
• Meeting Notes / Weekly Team Updates: Each week we have weekly standup and leadership meetings for each team. During these meetings we take detailed notes of the things our teams are working on, todos for the week and things that are blocking them. These notes are publicly stored so that each member can go back and review if needed. This helps us keep track of our team and personal progress.
• Company Updates: Every week a new company update is published highlighting the things each team is working on, each team gives a couple bullet points of updates to share with the rest of the team. We’ve found that as a remote company it’s difficult making sure everyone in the company is completely informed on what’s being worked on. These company updates allow us to publish a single source of information that everyone has access to.
• Guides, Best Practices and Policies: We publish guides and policies for new and veteran employees around scheduling travel, expense reporting, communication, working remotely, onboarding, and disaster plans like our latest guide on handling the Coronavirus as a remote team.

                  - Communication Guide: We use this guide to explain how we document all of our tasks, meetings and updates to keep things asynchronous. It also highlights ways to improve communication between team members and how to track productivity (if you wish to do so).

                 - Remote Working Guide: We know transitioning to remote can be a large change for some people, that’s why we’ve put together a guide to help people remain productive and comfortable while they work from home, a remote workspace or a coffee shop.

• Investor Updates: We don’t just say we believe in transparency, we actively do things to make sure we’re actually being transparent and that includes adding each and every investor update to Notion so that all team members can see how things are going.
• Shogun’s Vision: Where we plan to take the company in the next year, 5 years and 10 years is shared publicly so we can make sure we’re staying aligned.
• Dedicated Team Sections: Each team from Operations and Design to Product, Marketing, Growth, BD, Engineering and Support has their own dedicated space to share updates, resources, plans, and whatever else they think will help their team.
• And Fun Things Too!: We’ve dedicated space in Notion to share more about each other and our lives with sections for sharing personality traits, pictures of our furry friends and a spot to recognize other team members who have helped us in some way.

Clubhouse

Clubhouse is a project management tool. All of our engineering projects go in here, and other departments use this space, too.

• We have multiple workflows in each workspace that are used by different teams. Within those workflows, we have multiple projects.
• We organize the work into milestones, epics and stories.
• Milestones are checkpoints towards our goals that group sets of product features. For example we may have a milestone called Website V1 Release with a target date of 31 March 2020.
• Epics are collections of stories that represent larger initiatives or features and fall under a particular milestone.
• Stories are the individual pieces of work assigned to an individual. Stories often move between different workflows.
• For example, a story might move through a backlog workflow where the task is defined and prioritized and then move into the engineering workflow to complete per our software development process.
• Clubhouse allows us to easily track progress of work from many different perspectives. For example, we can view milestone progress from a high-level, strategic perspective or we can view progress on an individual project or feature.

Zoom

Zoom is probably our secondary communication channel, behind Slack.

• The Zoom slack integration works really well to start a quick zoom call with slash commands in any channel.
• We also use the Zoom Calendly integration and Google Calendar integration, so that Zoom meetings are the default.
• We have Zoom pro so that we aren't subject to the meeting size limits.
• We've found the setting that lets you increase the number of participants shown in grid mode to be handy for company-wide meetings.

Problems with Zoom

There are several big problems with zoom that come up frequently.

• It logs you out ALL THE TIME! We are constantly logging back into Zoom Mac app. This is infuriating.
• Audio frequently gets messed up, especially if you have AirPods. If you so much as jiggle your AirPods case while not using your AirPods for audio, Zoom throws a fit and you lose audio for 30+ seconds. It frequently asks you to type in your admin password on Mac to fix the problem.
• Virtually every external person who joins a Zoom call spends 30+ seconds setting up their audio.

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How do you hold meetings?

We mostly use Zoom for meetings. Here are some tricks we use to keep them running well:

• If there are more than three people in the call, everyone is usually on mute by default.
• Calls usually have someone leading them who acts like a moderator — inviting people to talk and running through an agenda.
• For calls where everyone should get to speak (like update calls), the current speaker chooses the next speaker. This has multiple benefits:
  
  – It keeps the calls interesting.
  
  – No-one knows when they are going to get chosen to talk, so they have to pay attention.
  
  – Everyone has to try and remember who has already spoken, so they have to pay attention!

• In some calls, we do a "Question of the week" at the beginning, which is a chance for people to get to know one another on a personal level.
• We use Calendly extensively! We have groups setup on Calendly so that you can easily book a meeting with multiple people, without having to coordinate everyone's schedule manually.
• There are some weekly recurring calls, and otherwise we just do calls as needed for projects. Team members are encouraged to get on calls to make complex decisions. Often these are preceded by research asynchronously, e.g., a spike on an engineering task that gets written up in Notion.
• Most teams and/or squads have a recurring weekly check in for 30 minutes on a Monday. Larger teams with people across many time zones split this into two or more meetings.
• For ongoing large product projects, there is at least one weekly squad sync meeting to discuss issues and progress synchronously.
• Managers have 1:1 meetings with their direct reports every one to two weeks depending on the team.

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Do you ever get together?

Yes! We've held off site events and/or attended conferences with team members in Tbilisi, Las Vegas, Toronto, Sao Paulo, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Bangalore and more!

Additionally, a number of team members have visited our "HQ" in San Mateo, CA. We always take them to Sushi Sam's!

Doesn't information constantly get lost?

No. We write a lot of things down. We take meeting notes for most meetings. We write weekly updates to the company about what's happening and there's a lot of transparency about how the company is doing.

Isn't it lonely?

At times, yes! You have to be comfortable being alone a lot!  Remote work is not a great fit for everyone for that reason.

It's super important to have a schedule and stick to it. For example Finbarr, our CEO, has scheduled lunch breaks every day from 12-1.

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Setting Goals & Measuring Success

Setting the right goals and KPIs are important aspects of growing a company whether your team is remote or centralized. For us, setting goals is an ongoing process and something that we continue to improve upon.

How do you measure success?

• We're using OKRs through Ally. We're still figuring out how to do this well across the whole company, and structure goals that make sense.
• We have annual objectives at the company level. One of our 2020 annual objectives is "Build the best remote company."
• We have quarterly Key Results at the company level that align with the annual objectives.
• We have quarterly Key Results at the team level that align with the company level Key Results.
• We have quarterly Key Results at the individual level that align with the team Key Results.

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Managing the Engineering Process

At Shogun we practice agile development while empowering engineers to manage tasks independently.

• We work in two week iterations or sprints. This fixed time period creates a routine for the team of regular iterations or chunks of work that we aim to complete every two weeks.
• It is important for us to define and work towards a common sprint goal, if team members are ever in doubt as to what they need to do, they are able to refer to the agreed sprint goal.
• A sprint starts with a planning meeting where we discuss the work set out for the sprint. We stick to a regular time for the planning meeting that works for the majority of time zones, however, all meetings are recorded for those that are unable to attend.
• Tasks are always kept in priority order, when an engineer completes their current task they select the next task from the top of the “to do” list without having to ask “what should I do next?”
• In the engineering team we use Clubhouse as our single source of truth. We ensure that all work to be completed is added as tasks in Clubhouse.
• We use Git and Github as our online, distributed version-control system for managing and tracking changes in our source code. We follow a process for branching, reviews and merging that allows our teams to work simultaneously on projects without losing or overriding each other’s work.
• We use automation as much as possible, for example, we use the Github integration in Clubhouse to sync the status of tasks between Clubhouse and Github. As an engineer works through the development process described above, the status of the tasks are automatically updated in Clubhouse.
• The team completes a daily standup update via Geekbot indicating what they worked on in the last 24 hours, what they plan to work on in the next 24 hours and anything blocking their progress.
• As engineers we ensure that we only have one task in progress at any given time, this provides a clear snapshot of the progress of a project at any given time without having to interrupt an engineers flow to ask the status of a task.
• At the end of the two week iteration we have a retrospective meeting to review the last two weeks and discuss any improvements or changes that we want to make to continuously refine and improve the engineering process. The team answers the following questions in Geekbot on the last day of the sprint:

                 - What went well?

                 - What didn’t go so well?

                 - What should we change?

                  - What should we continue to do?

• The answers to these questions form the agenda for the retrospective meetings. Action items are recorded and reviewed at the start, middle and end of every sprint.

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Problems We've Faced with Remote

Although working remotely has helped us solve or avoid many of the problems associated with having a company office, it's not perfect. We've come across a few challenges at Shogun, but with proper research and the right talent you can alleviate a lot of the pain.

What are the biggest problems you face?

• International compliance and payments are big issues.
• Communication can be a problem. Especially when you have people on the West Coast of the USA working with people in Asia. Sometimes people get up early or stay up late for calls. Our squads are roughly grouped based on time zone, with at most an 8-hour time difference between any two members.

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Creating an Effective Home Office

One of the biggest factors in being comfortable and staying productive while working remotely is your home office setup.

We recommend having dedicated space you can come to and focus on your work for the day. Creating a dedicated space also helps you get away from work when you need even though your office and household are under the same roof.

What's your setup like?

When asked what we recommend when it comes to a desk set up we always emphasize ergonomics and a good internet connection of at least 25 mbps; we like to test our connection speeds using Fast.com. When working from home it's important to create a comfortable environment to work in so you can stay focused while working around all of the additional distractions of home life.

The Many Desks of Shogun

Finbarr Taylor, CEO

Finbarr's setup includes a Herman Miller Aeron chair, a motorized standing desk, an ErgoDox keyboard, and a 34-inch curved Dell monitor. For audio/video he uses a Blue Snowball microphone and a Logitech HD camera.

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Greg Beldam, Design Director

Greg's work set up includes a Macbook Pro 13", LG 38UC99 Monitor, Logitech Craft Wireless Keyboard, Logitech MX Master 2S Wireless Mouse, Logitech c920 Webcam and Master & Dynamic MW60 Headphones.

His gaming set up includes a PS4, Samsung 55" NU8000 TV, Durgod Hades 68 Keyboard, Logitech G900, Wireless Mouse, NXZT h510i PC Case, CPU: Intel - Core i5-6600K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor, Asus -, Z170-A ATX LGA1151 Motherboard, HyperX Fury Black 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory, GeForce GTX 1070 8GB Card, Steelseries Siberia 800 Wireless Headphones and LG 29WK600-W 29" UltraWide Monitor.

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Tiffany Cagwin, Operations Manager

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Tiffany's home office features a salt lamp, plants and air purifier for healthy air quality, a Buddha statue, gems and other zen decor for calm, an essential oil diffuser to help with energy and moods, a light therapy lamp for health in the winter that doubles as great lighting sourcing during video calls, metal boards and cactus sticky note holder for organization of inspiration and reminders, 2 mac laptops, wireless keyboard and mouse, printer and shredder, a computer stand to lift her laptop to eye level, a cushion for elbow comfort and a Hermen Miller office chair.

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Kalen Christ, Customer Support Specialist

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Kalen uses a Vertagear S-Line SL4000 Racing Series Gaming Chair and a PC built with a MSI Z370 ATX Motherboard, EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 XC Ultra Gaming 8GB GDDR6 GPU, EVGA CLC 280 Liquid/Water CPU Cooler, RGB LED Cooling, Corsair Vengeance 16GB DDR4 3600MHz Memory, EVGA SuperNOVA 850 P2 850W Fully Modular PSU, NZXT H700i Mid-Tower Computer Case, and an Intel Core i7-8700K CPU.

His A/V set up includes a, Logitech C922x Pro Stream 1080P Webcam 1080P and Blue Yeti USB Microphone.